"Subject line goes here" is always the most-opened subject line

a quick hello from the internet

Hi, team. Dave here. Just writing with a quick hello, and also thoughts on AI in search, a seed of a voter guide idea that turns out to be an excuse for me to worry about social media, and a digital journalist’s shout into the void where the void shouts back validation and solutions — this newsletter’s inaugural recurring feature!

PERSONALLY I PREFER GOOGLE SEARCH GENERATIVE EXPERIENCE’S EARLY STUFF

In May, Google dramatically expanded the number of users that see its news exec panic experience generative AI search experience. Many in the industry read the news like this: “Blah blah blah could reduce search traffic by 25 percent”¹  [slow-motion coffee spit-take set to ‘Ave Maria’].

• Search results include summaries generated from stuff on the internet, including your stuff. Summaries conclude with little links to some of the sources. At the moment such credits are a bit below the “the least you could do” bar.²  

  • This had all been in wide testing for nearly a year, but we newsfolk are a hardy bunch and will reliably consume an industry-related surprise well past its expiration date.

  • Opting out means opting out of search entirely³ , which is obviously so unattractive that it may just save some media brands from, I dunno, becoming the face of a doomed movement to stop an inevitable cultural shift in media consumption.⁴

  • While there have been some stumbles (like the glue pizza excitement), this is the future we’re getting.

• OK, for those of you in audience jobs, here’s a digestible technical dive with some interesting tidbits. (“Google will begin reporting AI Overview impressions and clicks in its Search Console reporting, but won’t distinguish those generated by traditional search and AI Overview.”)

  • Also interesting? “AIO is less likely to show … on local queries.“ But this is all changing rapidly right now, so don’t count your local chickens.

CAN YOUR VOTER GUIDE STAND UP TO AN ENGINEERED TSUNAMI OF B.S.?

Just as election season never ends anymore, neither does voter guide season for politics editorial teams and audience journalists. In the spirit of the forthcoming News Product Alliance session on “Reimagining the Voter Guide” (to which I am looking forward), here’s my pitch:

• You already include trust articles that describe how you cover elections. What if you also included (again, as a key part of the voter guide, where many people will first encounter your publication’s deep expertise) an article that describes how you cover anything — like, how journalism works year-round. We’ve been providing critical information at the critical moment, but is there also an opportunity here to teach a user to fish? Genuine question.

• I’m not panicking but the excellent book “The Chaos Machine” deepened my understanding and dread vis-à-vis social media, our brains and what the former has willingly done to the latter, and now I’ve finally read a series of social-media-and-politics studies published in Science in July of last year.⁵  

  • The first, Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook, shows that, yes, Facebook users see different stuff if they’re liberal or conservative, but also that conservatives see a far more homogeneous selection of news (and they’re more likely to see “a far larger share” of misinformation). ALSO: Ideological segregation is way higher on Facebook than it is in users’ general web browsing.⁶ Pages and Groups are worse than the Newsfeed, and the researchers close with this banger: “Overall, these patterns are part of a broader set of long-standing changes associated with the fracturing of the national news ecosystem, ranging from Fox News to talk radio, but they are also a manifestation of how Pages and Groups provide a very powerful curation and dissemination machine that is used especially effectively by sources with predominantly conservative audiences.”

  • Next, How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?, compared user behavior on Facebook and Instagram in the run-up to the 2020 election by giving one set of users their normal algorithmic feed and one set of users a plain reverse-chronological feed. On reverse-chron, users saw a lower proportion of both like-minded and “cross-cutting” (unlike-minded?) political content, “offset by increases in content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences.” Reverse-chron also saw more “untrustworthy” content and less “uncivil” content. They also were less engaged and spent more time with other social apps, so I wouldn’t bet on platforms adopting this approach.⁷  

  • In any case, the work we do on our own platforms, and to get people to our own platforms and into our email lists, our text groups, our live events, etc., is more important than ever. A grim and familiar caveat from the second study: “Our research design … cannot speak to whether social media shapes societal incentives…. [I]f ranking algorithms affect the demand for certain kinds of content, they could influence the decisions of content producers.”

A pain point that might seem familiar

First of all, this is a great question that I’ve also asked and been asked! It’s funny, too, because this has been an emergency for decades, but in the last half decade we seem to have moved past just having meetings about it and onto “You there, please go and get us the new audience that has no reason to trust us yet, thank you. No, we don’t know where they are, but you’ll figure it out.”

And you will.

OK, I went to two people with this. First, a really sharp audience mind whose thoughts about measuring audience differently you probably recently read somewhere — Alexandra Smith, chief strategy officer of the 19th:

And someone who has been a brass-tacks audience growth person for years — Bill Emkow, growth strategy director of Bridge Michigan:

Thanks to Alexandra and Bill for sharing their expertise! I’d add that if you’ve got the budget or person hours to do it, four interviews of people in your target audience could go a long way toward refining the approach for the above-suggested methods. Can your org buy four $50 Visa cards and offer two to current readers and two to non-readers found on, say, a relevant Facebook Group? Spend an hour or two with each!

Tell me what challenges you’re facing — maybe you’ll be the validation someone else needs. Or: Do you have expertise to share?

A FINAL THOUGHT

“Robot Dreams”⁸ was cute and sweet and sad and great. Why is the cartoon dog-and-robot movie the first such movie about loneliness and friendship to make me feel OK and better-equipped to be a human at the end? Wordless animated movie of the summer, and now I keep getting requests to play Earth, Wind and Fire at home (in a non-”Avatar” context).

That’s it. Tell your friends about your new third-favorite newsletter! See you in a couple weeks!

1  This estimate seems low to me.

2  By design: “…they are absolutely going to keep working on this stuff because this is existential for them. For them, this is the next version of Search. This is the way they build the Star Trek computer. They want to give you the answer. And in many more cases, over time, they want you to not have to click a link to get any additional information.”

3  Or, nerdy explainer alert, possibly removing snippets from your links on search results which may be roughly as bad.

4  Look, I’m as shocked as you are that I’m linking to MetalSucks dot net in the first issue of this, but it’s perfect. We’ve seen this movie before — the world changed and Metallica didn’t exactly gain fans when it sued the hot new thing. If you’re the NYT or another gorilla, go for it, maybe it’ll be leverage for when you eventually strike a better deal than the ones being struck by others today, which btw are only the very top of the rabbit hole. But no matter who you are, the real challenge is sorting out which parts of your enterprise this “automated plagiarism” (as it’s been called, not unreasonably!) threatens, which parts it doesn’t, and what new things you should be doing that absolutely can’t be done by generative AI alone.

5  Buy the print issue for 15 bucks! The individual digital articles cost more.

6  I’m a proponent of the Revenge of the Homepage theory of the internet in 2024, and this is a reason to root for it.

7  This and another study, Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions, weren’t able to detect “downstream” behavior effects — as in, “limited impact on politically relevant attitudes and offline behaviors.” That’s heavily caveated (the studies were “relatively late in terms of user adoption and in the midst of a politically divisive period”), but maybe the tiniest relief?

8  Don’t read too much of this! Go in cold!